Editor

Good morning. Cisco’s acquisition of networking technology startup Meraki should make customers cringe. Cisco is making all the right noises about letting the nascent vendor do its own thing, but the company’s record with acquisitions, such as Flip camera maker Pure Digital, is reason to give customers pause. Brooks Automation CIO Fred Chaloux, who was hoping to standardize on Meraki equipment at his next refresh cycle, says he was “disappointed” by news of the deal. “Meraki has great innovation and that’s the concept we bought into,” he told CIO Journal. “We’re hoping the acquisition doesn’t inhibit that,” he added. Chaloux thought Meraki would likely go public, as CIO Journal in August reported it was planning to do.

Comments (4 of 4)

Cisco has a long history of acquisition and there have been few duds, like the Flip. In fact, the Meraki acquisition is one that goes back to the time when Cisco were the poster child for tech acquisitions - small company, with an innovative niche in the market place, having either no salesforce or a small salesforce to integrate, ability to offer the principals a key role within Cisco, a product that is either within a core area for Cisco or closely adjacent and so on.

Flip was an aberration for Cisco in that it didn't map to any of the key areas listed above while Meraki fits it perfectly well and is a growth area for Cisco - midmarket customers and Cloud.

5:26 pm November 20, 2012

#unsubscribe wrote:

Along with what others have already said...

I think your blog is sadly misinformed and rather sparse with any fact whatsoever. Cisco is renowned for its acquisition strategy and ability to execute. I will not go into ALL of the examples as that would take more space than your entire blog and I believe you may be in a spin over HP’s announcement of an $11.2B acquisition that went terribly awry. To bring up Flip as an example is ludicrous. I would agree that Cisco should never have bought Pure Digital in the first place. However, to infer that Cisco wrecked Flip is well flippant, no pun intended. The market and innovations in Smartphones doomed the technology. Before you make such outrageous claims based on such sparse anecdotal evidence, please check your facts.

I understand the point you were attempting to make over concerns that SMB, Meraki customers would have and I don’t necessarily disagree, but to simply spew arguments as in the blog is garbage.

11:49 am November 20, 2012

Ignorance is not bliss wrote:

In the last 5 years, Cisco has acquired over 70-75 companies. If anything, CIO's will be anxious to see how the Meraki product is integrated into other Cisco products. Such integration occurred when Linksys and Tandberg were acquired, to name a couple. I would agree that the Flip investment was not a good one - timing of the HD video market was what killed the product. With the introduction of HD video capable phones and other mobile devices, Flip was doomed as a video only device. I believe Fred Chaloux will be surprised to see how things turn out (in a positive manner).

9:35 am November 20, 2012

Confused wrote:

I would hope that CIOs would be able to tell the difference between Meraki and a consumer HD video toy.

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